Sylvia's Journal

Interpreting behavior, words across the vast cultural divide that exist between me and my Afghan colleagues is hard work. This is a high context culture, I explained to one of my staff with whom I had a hard talk this morning. This means that you can exchange one word with your Afghan colleagues and you entirely understand each other. But when you and I exchange even whole sentences we might as well speak Chinese; we need to turn to a low context conversation for the simple reason that the context needs to be made visible.

I need to say and hear many words to reveal context. In the process both of us risk using words that convey something else, a poor translation of something richer in either one of our languages. This is the constant dilemma and our unending challenge. ‘Oh, by the way,” he said, you have so many words for this word ‘problem,’ where we have only one ‘mushghil.’ You call it a dilemma, a problem, a challenge, hardship, etc. For us these are all musghils.”

We found ourselves (again) in the wake of mismatched expectations. But should I be surprised? Come to think of it, it is more than a miracle that we are not constantly running into problems or mushghils; given our different backgrounds and life experiences we actually should have a very hard time working together.

Luckily we don’t; just an occasional flare up that requires a serious talk. We did that today, first in the morning which left us in an impasse, and then another brief talk which showed some progress and finally over lunch in the privacy of my office, we got sufficiently back on the rails that we can see each other in the eye and move on.